Writing Exercises

I attend a weekly writing group. I thought it was a great coincidence one week when I arrived for class and the prompt on the blackboard was, "What did you dream last night?" I wrote most of "Go North For Freedom" that day.

There were other prompts too: first was to write a dream dictionary for five words yelled out randomly by class members. Here's what I came up with:

Dirty Dishes - if you dream of dirty dishes in your home, you are stressed and overextended. If you dream of dirty dishes at someone else's home, that person is not trustworthy. If you dream of cleaning or clean dishes, you are prepared for new opportunities. If you dream of broken dishes, you are about to lose money.

Newspaper - if you dream of carrying a newspaper, it denotes that you can trust your associates. If you dream of reading a newspaper, you should consider going back to school.

Statue - if you dream of a large statue, you are about to encounter a powerful person. If you dream of a small statue or figurine, it refers to someone in your circle of friends and family. If the figurine is an animal, it denotes a child; if a goddess, your wife or mother; if a god or bust of a revered man, your husband or father. If the statue is broken, your relationship with that person will undergo changes.

Fish - if you dream of fishing, you are seeking answers in life. If you are eating fish, you are growing into the wisdom of age and experience. If the fish is threatening, such as a shark or piranha, you are learning to protect yourself spiritually and mentally. If the fish are in a tank, you are risk-averse.

Monkey - if you dream of a circus monkey, you are feeling unchallenged and perhaps humiliated at your job. If you dream of a monkey in the wild, you are being given an opportunity to be true to your nature.

Next, the class leader put a list of book titles on the board, all with the word "dream" in the title. The exercise was to write something about what I supposed the books were about. And for the most part, the titles were general and nondescript enough for the exercise to work.

I Still Dream About You features Fabio with black hair, clutching a swooning beauty in a torn dress, drowning in a sea of lace and blonde.

The Mind At Night is a work of nonfiction where three theses are discussed for 600 pages, the fascination of each wearing away steadily, the footnotes a rockslide of shale on a sandy seabed.

The Dream Doctor is a novelization of a British SF show wherein a dashing man in a bowtie rescues a plucky but bewildered English girl from a villain with the face of a pig.

Fever Dream is an earnest, dramatic novel following a married couple through the dissolution of their relationship. There's a picture of a tree on the cover. I suppose someone might read it...

The Lake of Dreams is a novel for young people, where brothers fight and a girl has an awkward time with a bathing suit.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is too famous. Everyone loves it and there are a bunch of internet memes based on it. LOL.

I dreamed an episode of Doctor Who.

Walking with a neighbour, I come to a park bench and there's a man sitting there. He's Asian, with dull bushy hair and dressed in jeans and a hoodie. My friend speaks to him gently for a while. Someone passes by and says, "Why are you so nice to that guy?" My friend says "He's going to die soon." She puts her hand on his leg and shows that he is skin and bones, his leg the thickness of a bone under his jeans.

We sit with the man - it seems his mother is there too. Then there's a party; a bunch of neighbours gather. The man takes an interest in me and tells me I too will be dead soon, maybe in a year and a half, unless I make changes. I lean over the table to reach for something, and while I do he leans on my back and spits on me. Supposedly that's healing.

Later, we are walking past a business and the owners are closing up, taking some things out to a vehicle and tidying up inside. There's a sign on the window proudly describing the oil well that used to be on that very spot a century ago.

Suddenly there's a mild rumbling in the ground that continues for several minutes, and somehow we know the building is possessed. Some otherworldly creature has moved in. It's in the basement. The owner angrily goes down there and comes back enraged, because the whole basement is sealed off with grown-in roots of some sort, white like bratwurst.

Then The Doctor arrives. He says in his giddy way that such-and-such has taken over the building and we must be very careful of it. The owner, hearing this, decided, against The Doctor's advice, to go back to the basement and try to force the thing out. He saws at the roots that clog the door but before he makes any progress, there's a scream from below and the building quakes severely. The floor bursts open, the building shatters, and a giant insect crawls out of the roof and into the house next door, where the sleeping owners wake in horror and run into the street in their pyjamas. The otherworldly creature now has their house; the business next door is a ruin.

People keep on using the house, because it's in one piece, but the energy inside is so fearful, so oppressive, that everyone connected with it goes through their days with a haunted look around their eyes. The Doctor, meanwhile, tries to find a way to expel the creature.